...So I Finally Quit Spotify
...So I Finally Quit Spotify
So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:
I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I'll wait. Hint: there's a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.
Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK... but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming...
Article seems to boil down to 'I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share' . There's a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There's also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc...
Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro's and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don't meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don't really relate to one another or any particular point.
Adding our Boys Qobuz to the list of competing services Paying in 2018 13 times more than Spotify And yu get to own the musics you buy on Qobuz and can put it on your NAS for example
Not going to give substack any views, so I'll pass on this one
What's wrong with it? (I never heard about it, just asking)
They outright won't ban Nazi content from their website. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
If you're so petty about it, use archive.org or archive.is to view the page
A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don't take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.
And that's pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.
I dove into my box of CD's and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90's on my phone and haven't used spotify since.
EDIT: and, yeah, I've re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.
I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality ("free" versions labeled ass 1080p often aren't actually 1080p, etc).
But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD's and DVD's.
On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we're also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.
I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD's in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.
Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.
Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.
Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.
I don't stream either. All my music, I own. No one is taking it away.
Unlike Disney, Netflix, etc, Spotify is the only streaming service where I never think oh this is missing let's find a torrent.
Music streaming (at least for the consumer) is so much better than video. Where it's super scattered over multiple services all wanting money.
Maybe you don't listen to many international songs, I always find grey songs on the playlists I like.
Probably most artists I listen to are European or American.
I find that I can only find about 90 percent of what I want to listen to. That's more than enough of a burden to opt out entirely. Live albums, demos, collabs, and obscure dead bands you can't really find with great success
Yeah I've never fully switched to Spotify because of that but I do like their library and ease of use, the playlist function we use for parties a lot and it's just easy and everyone understands it already.
As a Phish head and purveyor of bootlegs, and sometimes specific masters of classic albums, my personal music collection has always been a sacred space.
I frequently can’t find songs. I will say they generally are obscure though.
I agree with her arguments about Spotify overall, but this amused me-
To celebrate my newfound freedom, I downloaded a 13-minute long Taylor Swift megamix, and CAN YOU DO THAT ON SPOTIFY? I didn’t think so. I also then went on to Bandcamp after I got paid the other day and bought some music. It felt good.
As if Spotify somehow prevented her from doing those things anyway...
Don’t ya know if you have prime and Netflix you can no longer legally purchase a blue ray ever
Obviously this is presented in the sense that being a Spotify user means you're not pursuing other methods of music acquisition, and to be fair that's probably the case for most people, you're paying for a service that's supposed to meet all your music listening needs after all. Personally I also use other means like vinyl, YouTube, and a large local collection but that's because I'm deep into music, also as a maker of it.
And in 2024, Spotify will stop paying out songs which get less than 1000 streams in a year. Which means for me, as an artist in the early stages of my career, I am going to get paid nothing. I could get over 1000 streams on all my songs in total, but still get paid nothing. I could get 999 streams on a song one year and 999 streams on it the next year… and still get paid nothing.
As the author states in the previous paragraph, Spotify pays 0.003c per stream. I don't think the author has done the maths. 1000 streams equals 3c. He's complaining over not getting paid 3c as if that will fund his career
It's not 0.003¢ per steam, it's $0.003. (Actually £0.003, per that article.)
So 1000 streams should pay $3.
He's complaining over
*she's
Your 3c (or $3, whatever) might not be much but they're saving that across thousands and thousands of small artists so for them it's another lucrative way of skimming the profits of the actual creators for themselves.
From what I read, it's more about stopping people using auto generated songs and uploading thousands of songs
Spotify used to be good but now they charge you the price of buying an album outright.
Might as well buy an album monthly and actually own it.
That works if you listen to just a small number of albums, but I average about 15 unique albums per month and probably 60 per year.
lol yeah I listened to over 150 new genres and thousands of artists this past year (according to Spotify wrapped), buying all those albums would be thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands.
Just to add, I do buy albums but more as a way to support the artists. Tidal is for convenience.
£10 = the price of every single album you listen to in a month, combined?
Yup. When I was kid and teen in the the CD era, I was buying 2 or 3 CDs a month for at least 10 to 20 bucks a pop. Or I would temporarily have my parents sign up for something like the BMG record club when there was a good promo where I could get 10 albums for cheap and then cancel. Fast forward to today and I can get unlimited access to all music for cheaper than a single album per month back in 2005. I don't know how these economics can make sense even if you factor out physical media and physical distribution.
Last year I've listened to more than 6k different songs. If you'd be generous for the math and say 12 songs an album, 9 euro per album it's still over 5k a year. Spotify is just cheaper for me, even the high seas would cost me too much in terms of time
Everyone who listens to the same downloaded 50 song playlist everytime they open Spotify premium is paying for you to use the service
But I use it much more similar to you than those people so I am also winning lol.
I listened to 6k songs, just because spotify has them.
Do i need it? Absolutely not.
I cancelled when they increased the price and i went back to buying an album for life from the discount bin and putting it on repeat with the other 20 albums i still owned.
Back when I had an ipod I spent days downloading songs. I don't think my listening habits changed all that much, now I just don't download them via "legitimate" routes anymore
I find it most useful as a radio replacement for this reason, you can't find a service with more quantity. Personal music collection is still my main source though.
Spotify has always been a pain in the ass. For the longest time you couldn't listen to a single song someone shared because they forced you to create an account.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
I don't know why I feel like this is okay for Spotify to do but not YouTube.
My thinking is clearly flawed
Yup, either require an account to use the service, or don't. Don't do some weird middleground. It totally makes sense for saving playlists or whatever.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
OOT but Instagram does this and IT SUCKS
Worse, they don't even show you properly like "Sign In to visit this account", they just says the error message "Please try again". I thought there was something wrong with my Firefox or adblockers... But, nope it's like that in other browsers IIRC
My current rules are that I'm gonna spend £10 a month on music (what I'd be paying Spotify) and try to buy directly from artists. I'll allow myself listening to stuff on Youtube so I can gauge whether or not I wanna then go ahead and buy a song or an album if I've listened to it enough times and want it in my library.
So ... it's okay to listen to it for free on YouTube and maybe buy it directly, but not to pay a Spotify subscription and listen to it there (and also maybe buy it directly)? The whole rant about "Spotify doesn't pay musicians very much" comes off as disingenuous.
Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck was interviewed on CNBN about the Spotify IPO and gets around to making a good point about it here, "stop whining... me." Artists don't have to use a label and get paid in these "pitties" from Spotify, ultimately its a bizarre consumption model and likely unsustainable.
The amazing mental gymnastics that these people go through to justify their piracy and inane behaviors.
Musician's pay is just the excuse of the day for them to feel okay about what they're doing. Honestly, if you are gonna pirate then just pirate, stop pretending that it's for a good cause or higher purpose, other than to keep your own wallets stacked.
Probably pirated almost every artist I've subsequently bought from and go to shows average about once a month. Have professional musicians in the family and they work as studio musicians, composers for media, teaching, play in bands that do covers for corporate events, or as a backing band for a front person. That's probably the majority of musicians unless you're lucky enough to be in a band that gains any notoriety. Most bands are passion projects between musicians who have day jobs and might only play a few small gigs at local venues. So when we're talking about piracy as if it's the most significant thing impacting musicians, really it's a small facet of a very difficult industry to work in.
Honestly? No, while I do still pirate, I am slowly buying all the music I can buy in form of vynils records and CDs, other than digital downloads from bandacamp.
Watching for free on YouTube is not piracy, and laughably, I'd say it is better than using Spotify that quite literally exploits artists for cents.
Hey all, I'd like to distance myself from Spotify, but I really enjoy their discovery features. I've learned about a lot of bands both new and old that I wouldn't have otherwise. Do you have any suggestions for a service that could replace this aspect of it?
I've used Spotify, Apple music, YT music and nothing beats SoundCloud stations for discovering new music based on a song.
and their "More of What you Like" playlists are just stations based on your recently most played songs and they just don't miss.
for someone like me that has songs from a lot of different genres in my regular rotation of 10-15 songs every month or so, it's perfect for discovering music.
Bandcamp is pretty good. They do writeups that I think are written by real people. When you look at a band you like, it tells you about stuff other people who like them have. I've found a lot of stuff there.
It is more about buying music than renting it, however. Most albums it will ask you to buy after a certain number of plays. I think the band can configure those details
Bandcamp was bought out by Epic Games, fired half of it's staff to make the bottom line look better, and is now owned by some private corporate music licensing company that refuses to recognize it's employee union and fired even more employees that were all involved in their unionization effort. I wouldn't recommend supporting them anymore.
This all happened in September btw so any enshittification of the service has yet to come to fruition.
I find last.fm's "similar artists" feature more accurate that Spotify's. But that's just for finding new stuff and tracking your history. Not really for actually playing the music. I linked it to Spotify and use them both together
There's a name I haven't heard in a long time, used to love last.fm and pandora etc
Not that it’s any better in terms of ethics or artist pay, but YouTube Music has relatively decent auto playlist generation with settings for discovery. Plus you get ad-free YouTube without having to use piped or vanced or whatever people are using these days.
Yeah I know it's not a popular position these days but I have been a Google Music subscriber since the early days.
IMO YT Music doesn't disappoint when it comes to finding what you're looking for.
And not having to worry about fighting Google on ad-blockers with YT is a convenient add-on.
If you like modern rock, theres a free app (no ads or any bullshit either) or listen via website. Former radio DJ quit the industry and started his own online station. Im definately biased here as i used to listen to him all the time when i would drive all day long, but as its literally free and not supported by ads.
No account needed also
Anyways if you like modern rock whatwasthatradio.com
It is dedicated to only playing new music
He didnt like all the amazing music that exists to continue to go completely unnoticed by commercial radio so hes doing it himself
Hes supported by subscribers on patreon etc
If i remember correctly all songs are 36 months or newer
This is a proper SOCAN licensed service (canadian broadcasting license I think) so hes doing it proper.
I personally have found at least a dozen new artists to listen to because of this free service
heres some of the bands he has done interviews with to give you an idea.
Search your favourite artists. Wiki them etc. and learn about them whilst simultaneously finding where they're members play in other bands or have other projects. Also, it can illuminate what they're influences were/are and you can listen to that too. I find a shit-tone of new music this way.
Deezer. Interface/UX is a little jank but it's private and discovery is good.
Radio Paradiso. Berlin based radio. Weird and wonderful.
I use Yandex Music for discovery. For some reason, I can't get Spotify to recommend the same amount of new stuff I like. You might need a proxy though because the content there is region-locked. Also I used both Yandex and Spotify for free, it's just fine on desktop with Ublock Origin.
How about FM radio waves?
So you can hear the same 5 songs on repeat interspersed with tons of commercials?
Radio fucking sucks, amigo. Literally the most homogeneous playlists ever unless you are close enough to a college radio station or a major city that can support anything other than top 40 or the same 100 classic rock songs.
I discover more ads than music that way
Down voted cause substack allows nazi content.
Blocking because irrelevant comments are annoying
That's nice for you
Upvoted because this article was an interesting read.
Ugh, spotify soot again?
At least according to spotify (it would probably be illegal for them to lie anyways), Spotify pays almost 70% of revenue to rights-holders (whoever distributes the thing, e.g. record labels), which means they take about the same cut as Steam. Good luck complaining about that.
You often see people citing the $.003 per stream for rights-holders figure for Spotify. That's not exactly what Spotify decides! Spotify pays rights-holders share of the 70% of the revenue based on how much they were streamed. TL;DR: Spotify pays rights-holders slices of pie based on how much their artists help bake. So, if artists aren't getting payed enough, Spotify simply isn't getting enough revenue despite reinventing radio for its free tier!
Not to mention how certain rights-holders (fortunately not DistroKid) gobble royalties away from artists. And, the author's solution to (insert @Nougat's comment here)?
(On a side note: I hate Tidal free, because it "doesn't" have ads! Every single interruption I've encountered so far is the generic Tidal announcer telling me to subscribe to premium. Sometimes I even get a freaking video "ad" on cellular data telling me the same thing, and there are only 4 "ads" in total! There's no variety! It's just repeating! Aaaaaaaaa (dw just yelling me name
For what its worth (and its totally fine if you dont see it the same way) a free service that is promoting itself is a special type of advertisement and should be excluded from talking about ad supported content or when using just the phrase ads
That being said it is still equally disruptive but its not trying to schill you something you arent already committed to using and for free service thats an entirely fair way for them to try to get new subscribers and seems more like promotion than advertising
Agree to disagree but i do think its an important distinction when discussing ads
To enlighten our android-using brothers and sisters... https://xmanager.app/ is a good way to enjoy spotify if you insist on using it.
Do you know if it it works with Android Auto?
Yes, this is an installer for modded Spotify.
For Android Auto though you need to turn on developer mode and enable unknown apps to be shown -- it won't recognise the modded app by default.
After that it's fine in my experience.
I just quit Spotify too and went back to mp3s I’ve downloaded with Limewire. I got sick of playlists, messy UI, etc. I also got tired of people talking about their top music of the year. I honestly don’t care what you listened to the most.
All my mp3s are on my phone and on my Mac and work great
I also am not guilty not giving artists the $.0003 per play every time I play a son. Less guilty than the $1 per song in the 2010s or $20 per album in the 2000s…
I quit Spotify too though still in Apple Music. Hopefully later I'm able to buy non-DRM music (from something in Bandcamp to CD or even Vinyls). Actually I went to Vinyl store yesterday, it was such a refreshing experience.
Honestly I got sick of subscription. I know I'm not alone with that. I want to actually own my own music. I don't want to pirate either 'cause I still genuinely support those artists.
You’re shitting on Spotify and use that to defend that you’re stealing from artists?
Spotify is stealing from artists too. I’m just not lining that corporations pockets. I still buy albums from band camp and go to shows and buy merch — all much more direct impactful ways of supporting the artists.
I switched to Tidal from Spotify because as secure my password is, I would always be intereupted mid-listening by my app putting on a shitty random music (often RAP) and discovered that there was an underground operation of people using pirated accounts to inflate stream numbers to get into the popular playlists. And with Tidal I can use Tidal-DL to download flacs to my Navidrome server which is cool.
this happened to me as well and i have no idea how. fascinating
If your account is linked to your Google, Apple or Facebook account that might be the culprit (I think you can see this in yout account settings). You need to check that because the consequences could be way worse than just having access to your Spotify account. You can use HaveIBeenPwned to look for leaks matching your e-mail address or password.
Another possibility is that your browser/OS or spotify client was infected by a token stealer which can automatically steal your access tokens as you log-in after changing the password.
Does it work with JellyFin as well?
I use the “Lite” version of spotify that isn’t strictly available for download in the states. It still has real shuffle and isn’t as bogged down with bloat features. Literally the only downside is no sleep timer.
How do you deal with discovery?
That's the hard part for me, the only way I find new music is by it ending up on a continuous playlist or something similar.
I have broad tastes, which makes it difficult to not be boxed into a recommendations genre on many platforms (Spotify included).
Last weekend I used https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic to copy my Spotify playlists over to YouTube Music, and the shuffle play is SOOO much nicer there! That was my primary gripe with Spotify, the shuffle play is idiotic
As far as I recall. YT Music pays even less than Spotify does unfortunately.
You cannot make a difference this way. Their music is a commodity they have signed agreements to sell. They probably (in the vast majority of instances) had almost no bargaining power in this and a lot of signed artists don't make a penny from their work, at all.
If you really like an artist, contact them via their official channels and ask if you can send them money directly or donate to a charity they like.
here’s a TL;DR summary for what we’ve got:
- Spotify paid the artists $0,0032 per stream
- Apple Music got the average rate of $0,0056
- Google Play Music landed a $0,0055 payout rate
- Deezer fell slightly lower at $0.00436
From https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts#streaming-payouts-on-spotify-apple-music-google-play-and-deezer which is admittedly a bit old.
I never got into Spotify. Soulseek is all I need.
Give nicotine+ a try some time.
I only used Spotify for podcasts when I used to be on the road all the time. For music, I've had a free Pandora account for years now. Does what I need it too. And with wireguard+pihole I don't get ads either.
I only used Spotify for podcasts
This is funny because I remember the days people HATED Spotify for adding podcast and only listen to podcast on their own separated app (I use PocketCasts)
To be fair, nowadays several podcasts stopped issuing their feeds and can only be listened to on spotify because they bought exclusivity, it sucks.
Muaicbee+poweramp with 600gb music for 15 years now. Love it. Nice to see other people wanting to follow the old ways.
I've been using Musicbrains Picard for tagging and Plex for streaming but will be switching to Jellyfin for my new build.
Actually have been using foobar2000 upnp server on my internal network more often lately. BubbleUPNP for an Android client works really nicely.
This was my setup for the longest time. Just a few years ago did I switch to musicbee+plex+plexamp. Also last.fm ftw
I quit Spotify the other day too. I pay for tidal nowadays. I don’t like running widevine on my machine so I rip flacs with tidal-dl. Honestly, great stuff. Would recommend.
I wanted to like Tidal, but its music discovery isn't great. It builds great lists of music you might like, but then they never change, and you end up hearing the same music over and over, with little change.
As someone who doesn't listen to playlists much, it was frustrating. But spotify isn't much better there either...
I haven't found a good service for music discovery. My best option so far is just searching for stuff, like:
- bands/artists like X
- top/new "genre" bands/artists
- openers for X
And so on, and then I filter by listening to a couple popular tracks by that band. That's a really crappy way to go, but it seems like it works better than Spotify et al.
deleted
My plex server chuckles….
This person really brags about paying $25 for a proprietary music player that's exclusive to Mac OSX.
Since Spotify serves lossy audio files still...I don't care about them.